We Need To Do What These Guys Are Doing

"These guys" are the Brits.  What they're doing is taking an inventory of their transportation infrastructure to assess its vulnerability to severe storm events caused by 'early onset' climate change.  The good news is that the Brits get it. They know climate change is real and that they're going to have to adapt or else.  In other words, the Brits have concluded that infrastructure designed for Halocene conditions just can't cut it in the Anthropocene.

Britain's crumbling rail network is not built to "modern standards" and is at risk of a repeat of the severe disruption of last winter unless urgent action is taken, according to a major new report being considered by ministers.

A review of the transport network's resilience was commissioned in the wake of the storms and floods of last winter. Cornwall and much of Devon were cut off and rail services west of Exeter suspended for two months after storms washed away the main line at Dawlish.

The report warns that it is a case of when, not if, disruption happens again. The severe winter of last year will be a regular fixture, it says.

But that sort of thing could never happen here, right?  Right?  Wrong.  This happened in Calgary last summer.

Over the summer we've witnessed how climate change impacts are overwhelming infrastructure across North America.  For example, storm sewer systems we designed and built to handle 19th and 20th century conditions can't handle the heavy downpours we get today and, for some, it's getting very, very expensive.

Jeff and Joanna Stefanek are homeowners in the Chicago suburb of Burbank. They know a thing or two about flash floods.  You might even say that, by now, they're pros.  They knew what to do when floodwater began pouring into their home Friday morning.

The Stefaneks got hit hard, but they were not alone.

Not that that was any solace. They dashed around the house, moving high-priced electronics such as a sound system and TV to higher ground atop sofas and tables. Jeff tried to save improvements such as new doors and woodwork he has installed since the last bout of flooding.

He was unable to “and now we have about $15,000 in damage,” he said.

“It flooded in 2010 and we gutted the house. It flooded again in 2013. It was like taking five steps back. And this is the second time it flooded this year,” he said.

The regional authority in Cook County is working on a flood relief plan that's due in five years.  Five years.  I expect the Stefaneks will be long gone by then.  The US National Weather Service has just issued another flash flooding advisory for their region.

Nature's Version of Waterboarding

Think of it as the difference between a refreshing drink of water and undergoing waterboarding.   We used to expect the former from nature but now, all too often, it's the latter.

Las Vegas is an object lesson.   The desert city is now forced to drain its essential freshwater from a distant corner of the state via a canal system.   Until nature shows up but then it's often in the form of deluge triggering flash floods.

The city, that averages 4.5 inches of rain annually, got hit with a 1.75 inch downpour that left parts of the city flooded, like this parking lot at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas:

The floods have hit various spots throughout the American southwest.   Yet this sort of urban flooding is now established world wide.   Many municipal storm sewer systems are not designed to handle the sort of rainfall patterns they're now experiencing.  Runoff becomes concentrated and backs up, resulting in heavy flooding.   From Britain to the Philippines to China to the United States and elsewhere, heavy flooding is becoming commonplace.

Many of these areas are also beset by sustained drought that can harden the ground and make it impervious.   Then, when floodwaters arrive, they don't seep into the ground but simply run off into what the Mexicans call arroyos, normally empty streambeds carved out by centuries of flash flooding.

Today's floods, just like today's droughts, evidence our broken hydrological cycle.   Surface temperatures warm, increasing evaporation.   Atmospheric temperatures warm, increasing volumes of water vapour, itself a powerful greenhouse gas.   Warmer, wetter conditions create more atmospheric energy that results in erratic precipitation patterns and severe storm events of increasing frequency and intensity.   Some regions get hit by torrential rains, others are bypassed and experience drought.

This is occuring this year in most of the world's greatest grain producing countries - the United States, Australia and Russia in particular.   Food prices globally are already spiking.  A continuation of this threat will destabilize already wobbly countries around the world.

Predictable, reliable and moderate rainfall has been a vital part of mankind's introduction of agriculture that, in turn, facilitated the rise of civilization.   With but a few exceptions, farmers could count on receiving the right amounts of rainfall at the right times throughout the planting/growing/harvest cycle.   Too much rain or too little rain at any stage and the crop might fail.

Despite demographic predictions that the world population will reach 9-billion by 2050, perhaps 15-billion by 2100, the hydrological cycle problem could make those projections unrealistic.  At 7-billion, mankind's ecological footprint is already placing us in a severe "overshoot" deficit.   World Overshoot Day this year fell on August 22nd, several weeks earlier than just a few years ago.  In effect, mankind now uses a full year's worth of the Earth's renewable resources before the end of August, leaving us to "eat our seed corn" for the balance of the year.   This deficit is only going to be worsened by disruptions in agricultural production from droughts and floods.

We are being overtaken by events.   The theme of Gwynne Dyer's latest column could be "nobody saw it coming."  But it's here and we're going to have to find ways to live with it - better systems to collect and hold rainwater, curbs to water usage and wastage, improved agriculture and food distribution, for starters.   We're also going to have to realistically price carbon to whatever extent necessary to decarbonize our economies and our societies.  Above all else we'll need to develop technologies to strip atmospheric carbon in massive amounts.

For mankind this is likely the fight of our lives.   Yet that is still a far cry better than having to fight for our lives.

What's Up? Flash Floods, That's What.

From Britain to Africa, America to China and Russia, India to Canada, no corner of the world seems immune to flash flooding.   Is global warming the culprit?   In most cases, probably.

We done gone and broke the hydrological cycle.

How we broke it is as easy to understand as it is to prove with basic meteorolgical instruments.   We have warmed the atmosphere.   Not as much as we will warm it over the balance of this century but already enough to alter the hydrological cycle.   A warmer atmosphere coupled with global warming increases the evaporation of surface water into water vapour.   You wind up with more water vapour heading into the atmosphere which, as luck would have it, is likewise warmer so it can hold more water vapour.   Think of it as shifting the Earth's water from the ground to the sky.

Because the warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour it doesn't have to return that to the surface as rain or snow as it once did the way we came to expect it over the past centuries.   Now it's more likely to skip some places altogether and hit others with deluges that cause flash floods.

So, what are we going to do about it.   In the worst-hit spots we can implement adaptation measures, floodways and such, but the real cause is warming and we're not on track to do anything about that.  How bad could it get?   Well the Brits have been warned that they could have a four fold increase in flooding by 2035.

As severe floods continue to batter parts of Britain after the wettest June since records began, around one in seven homes and businesses face some kind of flood risk, the climate advisers said.

Around 160,000 properties would be at risk by 2035 if better planning and more investment was made in flood defenses, compared with 610,000 at risk if no action was taken, they said.

Like every other climate change impact, we in Canada - especially our political classes - are paying no heed, none whatsoever.   We're just whistling past the graveyard.